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0 pointsmarcosdumay5y ago0 comments

Sorry, but if all you got from Toyotism was Lean, than you got somewhere already fully geared into Taylorism. There is much more to it, and yeah, even one of the tenets you will get from Deming is that short deadlines and performance-tied bonus and careers can't work. He also goes a great length about empowering employees to change things like part sourcing, but yeah, not the final product.

(I don't know about worker health problems, and I imagine that poor as Japan was at the time, any empiric data on it would be useless. But, anyway, I don't think the management structure is the correct place to fix that one problem.)

And I'll have to break into your Marxist narrative, but all that was once incredibly successful in a fully capitalist framework. It never became non-competitive, it was only replaced by order of top-down command structures.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

NotPavlovsDog5y ago· 2 in thread

I would appreciate an expansion on the "break into".

The approach I outline can explain and predict why the two Ts rotate, including at Toyota (Toyota going Taylor, or rather normative - rational).

I prefer not to base my experience on what Deming or anyone else wrote, but how their writing relates to real-life practice (though of course as a critic of Taylorism as represented by MBO and other Performance Evaluation rational schools, he is a welcome breath of fresh air).

Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? I have only seen a shift towards projectification and cultural hegemony.

marcosdumayOP5y ago

What breaks the narrative is that the system is clearly not antagonistic. Giving the correct kind of autonomy to the workers increases every single item that management should care about, at least in a capitalist system. And both logic and evidence point that way.

> Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system?

As a participant, never. As an independent, we are talking about the mentor of the movement that teached the Japanese management how to go from an industry that didn't produce anything good into the highly developed one that outcompeted everybody all ever the world.

NotPavlovsDog5y ago

> What breaks the narrative is that the system is clearly not antagonistic

So why the shift to Taylorism at Toyota, the heart of the Toyota system? Why the shift to projectification from life-long employment at Japan? How can one explain chronic injury if workers get to plan and improve the workflow (or are wasted humans not considered waste)?

And the Toyoda principles at the heart of Toyota predate Deming. (Ohno, Taiichi (March 1988), Just-In-Time For Today and Tomorrow, Productivity Press, ISBN 978-0-915299-20-1 )

The list of paradoxes can continue indefinitely, or one can elect to look for the root cause.

dragonwriter5y ago

> from Deming is that short deadlines and performance-tied bonus and careers can't work.

well, for the performance pay, Deming is more subtle: its not that it doesn’t work, its that the performance must be something meaningfully under the employees control for performance pay based on it to work (otherwise it can’t influence anything), and it must be a holistic measure of company value (otherwise you get perverse incentives around microoptimizations), and your measure of performance must take into account the degree of uncontrolled variation in the process (otherwise you give false negative and positive signals due to random variation rather than real problems/improvements).

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